I have sold 0800handyman to The Zockoll Group

Reason for recent lack of blogging is that I have been frantically pulling together vast quantities of detailed paperwork to support the sale of my controlling stake in 0800handyman to the Zockoll Group. This sale is now complete, and I am now delighted to report that, after nearly seven years, I am handing over the reigns to new owners.

The Zockoll Group, and Jim Zockoll in particular, is (are?) responsible for establishing the only national brand in the domestic maintenance sector, Dyno Rod (now owned by British Gas, but founded by Jim Zockoll in the 60s). They have been a minority shareholder in 0800handyman since 2002, and now own a majority of the business. They are joined by one of our franchisees, Paul Geoghegan, who is now a director and shareholder of 0800handyman Ltd.

When I founded 0800handyman, or RedJacks as it was then, there were two businesses that I had ambitions to emulate. Kwik-Fit was one, and Dyno-Rod was the other. Both have succeeded in building strong, national brands, in sectors which have historically been plagued by poor service. That is exactly what I have been working towards with 0800handyman. We aren't there yet (we certainly don't have a national brand), but are a long way along the line. If you searched for "handyman" on the internet in 2001 you would not have found much at all. Now you will find dozens of companies all (I like to think) trying to emulate what 0800handyman is doing.

The existing team will continue, of course, and I would like to thank all of them publicly for giving me the opportunity to work with such a diverse and stimulating group of people.

I am looking forward to observing the progress of 0800handyman from a distance, and I sincerely hope that, in 10 years time, 0800handyman will have done for home maintenance what Kwik-Fit did for car maintenance and what Dyno-Rod did for drain clearance.

I have some ideas for new ventures, I'll start a fresh blog for those when there is something concrete to report. I'm sure you won't need to hunt too hard to find me.

****
Need any odd-jobs doing? Check out 0800handyman.

Rubbish collection, junk removal, blogs, e-mail newsletters

My friend Jason Mohr, who runs a business called Any Junk? (doing junk removal for households in London, Bristol and Birmingham), asked me the other day if they could have a mention in our email newsletter, in return for giving 0800handyman a mention in theirs.

But we haven't sent an e-mail newsletter for ages, because I've started to think that e-mail newsletters are too intrusive. A blog seems to be better, and those people that are really interested in what I have to say can subscribe to the RSS feed. As long as you don't mind sometimes waiting a few weeks for me to post (although, to be fair, I generally post several times a week, but just haven't for a while now. Back now.)

So I said I'd talk about junk removal and rubbish collection on my blog instead. Any Junk? seem to be doing a pretty good job in their sector doing what what we have done in ours: adding some professionalism, great service, efficient back-office systems (they use the same software as us, fancy that), and strong branding to a previously haphazard, one-man-band-dominated, sometimes dodgy, fragmented sector.

Just like in the handyman sector, the Americans are way ahead of us with junk removal. Jason has modelled his business, I think, on Got Junk?, the market leader in the US. If anyone is thinking of setting up a service business in the UK, checking out how they do it in the US is often a good place to start.

Junk removal has the added advantage of being able to play the green card. Some reasonably high percentage of everything they collect is either sold on or recycled, saving space in landfill. Jason manages to persuade everyone his business is so green that the taxpayer should actually pay for some of it - they were recently awarded a grant to buy four new trucks outright. I'm not sure if that is supposed to be public knowledge, but given that it is public money, it ought to be. And it is now. I am very cynical about taxpayers subsidising commercial businesses -- I think it is cheating -- but no doubt there is a strong economic argument for using tax money to keep junk out of landfill, blah, blah.

Anyway, if you need junk collecting or rubbish removing, do check these guys out, we've used them ourselves and they are excellent, and the chap the runs it is a good egg:


www.anyjunk.co.uk


*****
Need any oddjobs doing? Check out www.0800handyman.co.uk

T-mobile account management

This is priceless: because we now have a certain number of lines with T-mobile, we have been assigned our own "account manager".

But we can't get hold of this person (no direct line, and if they are unavailable, and presumably most of the time they will be on the phone to other customers given that that is their job, we have to leave a message. We have been waiting a day and a half for a call back so far), so we can't place an order for more lines.

Best of all, the ordinary people in the call centre are NOT ALLOWED TO HELP US. Only our account manager can now access our account. Last week (before we hit the magic number of lines which entitles us to this "improved" level of service) ordering a new line meant making a call, sending a confirmatory e-mail and handset would arrive the next day. Easy.

Now we have to wait for our "account manager" to call us back to carry out the trivial task of adding another line to our account. Just awesome.

**************
Need any odd-jobs doing? Visit www.0800handyman.co.uk

Should I have discounted this bill?

Just come off the phone after a very difficult conversation with a customer who is convinced we were overcharging her.

We attended her rental property back in August and carried out a list of jobs for her (she was not present).

She has a clear recollection that our man, Morgan, called her at 2.30 in the afternoon and said he estimated he had another 30mins to go. So she thought he finished at about 3pm. Morgan's jobsheet records he finished at 4.55pm, two hours later than that.

She is convinced Morgan made a mistake on his jobsheet. We are convinced he left at 4.55. We think this, because:

(a) that is what he wrote on his jobsheet
(b) he remembers calling the customer mid-afternoon, but does not think he said he would be finished in half-an-hour
(c) he didn't do any other jobs that afternoon: if he really did finish at 3pm for sure we would have sent him on to another job
(d) he recalls being there till pretty much the end of the day

On the other hand, it is hard to understand why the customer can have such a clear recollection of this conversation about finishing in half-an-hour if that conversation didn't take place. My best guess is that conversation did take place, but Morgan just underestimated what else there was to do, or later on noticed some other tasks on the list, or whatever.

(Note that the customer does not think Morgan was fiddling his hours, she just thinks he made a mistake)

The situation is not helped by the fact that this all took place in August - the customer says she discussed all these issues a while back with someone else in our office, but whoever that was didn't note down the details of the conversation and / or didn't act on it, which is a bit of a cock-up, to be honest. Had we dealt with this whole issue a week after it happened I suspect it would have all been a lot easier.

Anyway, as I did in a similar situation which I posted about here, I stuck to my guns and insisted that we charge for the time which we firmly believed we spent there.

We had already discounted this bill for other reasons: (1) we had originally charged her 30mins for a visit which had to be aborted because the tenants would not let us do the work at the appointed time, we agreed to waive this charge; (2) she felt that because we had had the benefit of seeing the work during the original aborted visit we should have come with all materials ready for the second successful visit and not spent time fetching them during the second visit (we always charge for time taken to fetch materials, but we agreed to waive an hour of the second visit again as a goodwill gesture) (3) we bought a tin of paint which was the wrong colour (no argument there, we shouldn't have ever charged for that).

So, we had already discounted 1.5hrs off this bill, but the customer wanted another 2hrs off. I declined to offer this.

I am sure the customer will pay the revised bill, but she is convinced she has been hard done by and will no doubt be relating this tale to her friends. If you are that customer, and are reading this, please feel free to post your version of events as a comment and I will publish it.

Freephone number back up

Looks like Opal have fixed whatever it was that they broke and our freephone number (0800 426 396) is back up.

Opal freephone numbers down - please use our landline: 0207 978 6674

Opal telecom's entire bank of non-geographic numbers (including, helpfully, their own customer service numbers) seem to be down this morning, and that includes our own 0800 number.

Please kindly use our landline:

0207 978 6674

until Opal fix this.

Is flat 18% capital gains tax (CGT) really so bad?

Gosh, everyone (e.g. Real Business, Supper Club, FSB, etc.) really is up in arms about Darling's new flat CGT tax. I thought we free-marketeers were supposed to like flat, low taxes? Isn't that what our next chancellor, George Osborne, keeps talking about?

Sure, if you sell your (long-established) business in May of next year, then 18% vs 10% looks tough. But if you buy some shares now, and make some money, and sell them in May of next year then 18% vs 40% looks good to me.

We do very well in this country when it comes to government-approved ways of avoiding capital taxes (EIS allows you to invest in an unlisted company and pay 0% CGT; EMI allows you to get share options in a company and pay 0% CGT; ISAs let you buy listed shares and, yes, pay 0% CGT; plus Child Trust Funds, etc. etc. Don't rock the boat, all this other stuff might fall off).

Politicians usually tinker around the edges of the tax system. You've got to hand it to Darling for being a bit ballsy - it is quite daring to just cancel, in one afternoon, a plank of the tax system that has been around for decades. Well done. I still might sign Duncan's petition though.